Lust & Lies

Interview Part 1

*A late-night Zoom call with a Jehovah’s Witness elder living a secret life of faith, family, and anonymous desire

I almost didn’t release this; I sat on it for over a month.

When Nathan first agreed to talk, I thought I knew what the story would be. A religious man leading a double life. An elder who cheats on his wife. Secret hotel rooms, anonymous bodies, hot group sex with strangers. The kind of piece that writes itself, scandalous, salacious, easy to sell. I pictured the headline and new subscribers.

What I actually got was the complete opposite.

This profile is raw and honest and, quite frankly, ugly. It is not glamorous. It is not sexy in the way I expected. It is the sound of a man coming apart in real time, carrying decades of silence, fear, and self-erasure. I sat with the recording for a long time afterward, wondering whether anyone needed to hear it. In the end I decided the truth of it mattered more than the version I had imagined.

I started the call with a pause long enough to feel deliberate. I sat in my dim home office, the light from the monitor catching the edge of a cold coffee mug. On the other side of the screen, Nathan was in a hotel room somewhere on the road. A single lamp threw soft light across a plain wall. He looked tired in the way that sleep cannot fix.

“I’ve been carrying pieces of your story around in my head for weeks,” I said. “Mind if I ask you some real shit tonight? Nothing off-limits.”

His answer came quiet and already frayed. “Go for it. Ask away. Nothing’s out of bounds… not tonight.”

What followed was not a clean interview. It was a slow unravelling of a man who has spent decades living inside two irreconcilable worlds.

---

Nathan no longer believes the organisation is “the truth.” He remains for his children. Sarah, his wife, is deeply devoted; she would never leave. He loves his kids more than anything. The secret income has allowed him to place them in private schools and set up college funds, things the organisation discourages. “I want them to have the choice I never felt I had,” he told me.

If Sarah found out the full truth, he was certain of the outcome. “She leaves. I lose everything. Kids. Parents. Friends I’ve known for decades. The whole life I’ve built goes up in flames.” He has pictured it so many times it already feels like a memory.

To understand the weight he carries, I had to understand the world that shaped him.

Jehovah’s Witnesses do not simply hold religious beliefs; they inhabit a total system that claims exclusive access to divine truth. The organisation presents itself as God’s sole channel of communication on earth. Every major doctrine, every moral boundary, every decision about who belongs and who must be cut off flows from that central claim. To question the organisation is, in effect, to question God.

Sexuality sits near the heart of that system’s control. Homosexual acts are classified as serious sin and are treated as grounds for judicial action. A baptised Witness who engages in same-sex behaviour and does not demonstrate sufficient repentance can be disfellowshipped. Disfellowshipping is not merely removal from membership. It is a formal cutting-off that requires other Witnesses, including close family members in many cases, to severely limit or cease contact. In practice it often functions as social death.

Nathan grew up inside this framework. He learned early that certain desires were not merely inconvenient; they were evidence of spiritual danger. The prescribed response was prayer, Bible study, increased activity in the ministry, and rigorous self-suppression. When those methods failed him as a teenager, he buried the feelings deeper and performed the expected role more convincingly. He eventually became an elder, one of the men entrusted with shepherding the flock, hearing confessions, and deciding who remains in good standing and who must be removed.

That position intensifies the contradiction. He has counselled other young ones struggling with same-sex attraction. For years he delivered the official line and felt like a hypocrite every time. “I’m sitting across from a terrified sixteen-year-old and telling him the same things that failed me. Prayer. Study. Suppress. And the whole time a quieter voice is screaming that I’m a fraud.” Most of those young ones eventually leave. He envies their courage. The ones who stay often grow quieter, more withdrawn. “Like the light goes out of them.”

Then came the tragedy that changed everything.

One of the young ones he had counselled took his own life. Nathan does not give the name. He does not need to. The moment he begins to speak about it, his eyes fill. The tears come quickly and without warning, the same tears that will later overwhelm him completely. His voice drops and cracks as he describes the aftermath, the quiet conversations among the elders, the carefully worded announcements, the way the congregation moved on while he could not. That death sits in him like a permanent fracture. After it happened, something in him shifted permanently. He could no longer deliver the official counsel the same way.

He still meets with young ones who come to him in quiet desperation. But now he counsels differently, and he does it in secret. Alongside the expected scriptural suggestions he is still required to offer, he finds ways to slip them information they are not supposed to have. He gives them support hotlines for gay youth, numbers they can call in private, without their parents or the congregation ever knowing. He tells them, carefully and without preaching, that they are not alone and that help exists outside the walls of the organisation. He does this knowing the risk. He does it because he refuses to watch another young person disappear the way that one did. The change is quiet, deliberate, and entirely against the rules he is sworn to uphold.

Twenty years after they last saw each other, Nathan ran into Caleb at a Darklands party. The memory still undoes him. “It was like the floor disappeared,” he said, voice already cracking, eyes wet again. “We both just stood there and cried. Twenty years vanished in a heartbeat. All those old feelings rushed back so hard I couldn’t breathe. I was completely in love with him back then. And if I’m honest… part of me never stopped.”

Caleb had been his closest friend in the congregation until the age of sixteen. When the elders disfellowshipped him and he was put out on the street, Nathan was left shattered. “I’ve been an elder myself,” he said. “They handled it the way the organisation trained them to. I don’t blame them for following the guidelines. But back then it destroyed me. I was suicidal. And those thoughts never fully left.”

The psychological toll of the dual life is the part he had the hardest time naming.

“It’s eroded me,” he said. “Not all at once. Slowly. Like water wearing down stone. There are two versions of me that never get to meet, and the space between them is where I live most of the time.”

He described constant low-grade panic mixed with numbness. Hypervigilance in every room. A self that has been split into roles, elder, husband, father, until the person in the middle has grown smaller each year. Intimacy with his wife has become complicated by guilt and distance. He is present with his children and simultaneously calculating how much of himself is safe to show. “She thinks she has a whole husband,” he said. “She has pieces.”

He used to believe the two lives could coexist indefinitely if he was careful enough. He no longer does. “The dual life doesn’t just take energy, it takes pieces of you that don’t grow back.”

When I asked what he needs most that he cannot have, his answer was simple and devastating.

“To be known. Completely. Without the mask. Just once. To sit with someone and not have to edit a single word or gesture or memory. I’ve been performing so long I don’t even know what the unperformed version of me sounds like anymore.”

That is when he broke.

The words caught. His face tightened, then collapsed. The tears that had already appeared when he spoke about the young one who died now came without restraint. He turned slightly from the camera as if privacy might still be possible, but it was too late. A broken sound escaped him, half sob, half gasp, and then the years of containment came apart all at once.

“I can’t… fuck… I can’t do this anymore”

His shoulders shook. He pressed both hands hard against his face, but the tears came too fast. The crying was raw and ugly, the kind that has been waiting a long time. His breath arrived in short, desperate pulls. Everything he had held, the dead young person he could not save, the living ones he now tries to protect in secret, the family he is terrified of destroying, the self he can no longer locate, poured out of him in that moment.

“I’m so fucking tired,” he said, voice muffled and cracking. “Tired of the lies. Tired of the masks. Tired of sitting in the Kingdom Hall looking like I have it all together when half of me is still somewhere else the night before. Tired of looking at my kids and knowing that if they ever found out the truth it would destroy them. Tired of touching my wife and feeling like a fraud. Tired of the dark places. Of the nights I sit on the edge of a hotel bed and think about just ending it so the noise finally stops.”

He dropped his hands. His face was wet, red, completely open. He no longer tried to wipe anything away.

“I don’t even know who I am anymore. The elder. The husband. The father. They’re all fighting for space inside the same body and there’s nothing left in the middle. I keep waiting for the day someone finds out, and part of me is terrified… and part of me is just ready for it to be over. Because at least then I wouldn’t have to carry it alone anymore.”

He folded forward until his forehead nearly touched the desk. For almost a full minute the only sound was the unfiltered noise of a man who has held himself together for too long finally coming apart.

I stayed quiet, present. “I’m right here. You’re not alone in this right now. Just breathe. You don’t have to hold it together for me.”

His voice, when it returned, was small and wrecked.

“I don’t know how to stop holding it together. It’s the only thing I’ve known how to do since I was sixteen and they threw Caleb out. I learned to survive by splitting myself into pieces. And now the pieces don’t fit back together. I’m scared that if I keep going I’ll disappear completely. And I’m scared that if I stop… everything I love will burn.”

He lifted his head. Eyes swollen, face streaked, stripped of every controlled version of himself that began the call. He looked directly into the camera without armour.

“I needed someone to see this. Not the version I show the Hall. Just… this. Whatever’s left of me when all the roles fall off.”

---

Only after the tears had slowed did the conversation turn to the other life.

Nathan travels constantly for work. Most of the scenes he films for his OnlyFans page happen far from home. No tattoos. No distinguishing marks. His voice is filtered in post-production every single time. Still, the paranoia never leaves. It lives under everything like a low electrical hum. He cannot film locally. The danger is too close to the territory he works and the congregation he serves.

Preparation happens in secret, even during ordinary workdays. A strict diet. Almost no food on filming days. A plug worn under a tight thong through meetings and deadlines so that by evening he is already open, already ready. “There’s something lonely,” he told me, “about sitting in a conference room while carrying that constant physical reminder of the other life.”

The money is carefully separated. Everything is registered in his Doms’ name (Dean). Profits are split. Nathan’s share moves into an account his wife does not know exists. Every three months he transfers a portion into their joint account and calls it a quarterly bonus. The rest stays hidden. When I pressed him for a figure, he finally said the word with a tired smile that did not reach his eyes: millions.

Dean is also higher up at the same company. The power dynamic follows Nathan into the office. There are days he is exhausted, deadlines pressing, and the last thing he wants is to drop to his knees in a locked room. Then he is reminded of what he is. “For a few minutes the stress disappears under something sharper,” he said. “Something that feels almost like relief… until the shame floods back the moment he walks out.”

The origin of the porn work was slow. It took a year and a half. Dean was patient and persuasive. Nathan had already been carrying a massive porn addiction for years — DVDs stashed in the attic while still deep in the Jehovah’s Witness world. The gangbang and cumdump side of his content evolved under Dean’s careful training. What began as fantasy became structure, then routine. Scenes can last hours. His body pays for it. Sometimes he needs chemical help to stay in the zone. There is a moment in almost every long session where his mind simply leaves. “I float,” he said. “That’s the part that scares me most. How easy it is to disappear inside it.”

The biggest risk he has taken so far was walking the streets of Folsom on a collar and leash without a hood, publicly available to strangers. The thrill of almost being seen is the same fear that could destroy everything. Both feelings live in the same breath.

When I asked how it felt to read a heavily fictionalised version of his life, he gave a soft, broken laugh. “Surreal. Awkward as hell. Seeing pieces of myself on the page felt like someone had reached into my chest and held the mess up to the light.”

Outside the hotel room window the city continued, indifferent. Inside, for a few suspended minutes earlier in the call, the performance had stopped. The elder, the husband, the father, and the man who disappears into anonymous scenes had all fallen quiet at the same time. What remained was simply a person who has spent decades trying to survive inside a structure that offered him no honest place to exist, a man suspended between lies and lust, still searching for the self that was lost somewhere between the two.

I sat with that silence long after the call ended. The hot story I thought I was chasing never arrived. What I was given instead was something far heavier, and far more true.

End of part one.